With the growing importance of environmental protection, waste liquid treatment, smell of processing solutions, and toxicity of processing agents to the human body have become serious problems in the latest photographic technology.
Under the circumstances, various improvements have been made and practiced in processing solutions (agents) and replenishing amounts of processing solutions to solve these problems, and at the same time, rapid-processing to shorten the processing time has come to be extensively practiced.
On the other hand, a higher sensitivity and a higher image quality are increasingly required of silver halide photographic light-sensitive materials (hereinafter occasionally referred to as light-sensitive materials).
And it has become important to make further improvements on light-sensitive materials as much as possible for the use in such a shortened processing time, in addition to the maintenance of the existing photographic properties.
It is well known in the art that decreasing the silver iodide content improves of a silver halide used in light-sensitive materials raises developability and accelerates desilverization.
Therefore, color photographic light-sensitive materials have been studied and improved on silver halide compositions, methods of forming thinner coating films, types and amounts of couplers and other additives in order to shorten the processing time and minimize the amount of processing solution to be replenished.
These means are useful in shortening the processing time, but insufficient in reducing the amount of a processing solution to be replenished and, therefore, these can hardly provide stable photographic properties when replenishment is small. And, even when thinner component layers are provided or two-equivalent couplers are used for the improvement of image sharpness and processability, contrary effects such as deterioration in graininess and variance in processing are liable to be produced.
For the foregoing reasons, development of a new technique which can constantly provide a high image quality is strongly demanded.